Coastal Vacations: Scam or Home Business Opportunity?

Recently I was approached by a YouTube user with a friendship request. This person had a video on his front page about Coastal Vacations. Apparently, Coastal Vacations was an incredible home business opportunity which could make you a lot of money. The person in question seemed to be doing very well for himself. He was getting a lot of traffic with his website, and a lot of calls from interested people. The trouble was, in his video I did not see him sell a single vacation. Instead, he was only selling the home business opportunity. Coastal Vacations seems to have the earmarks of a pyramid scheme or scam.

An online search turned up plenty of people who had bad things to say about Coastal Vacations. PRWeb claims that Coastal Vacations director Dean Marino is a respected businessman, and that scam artists in the home-based business were lone operators. Marino claims that the business attracts both honest and dishonest distributors. Apparently he helps new people in the company who have been defrauded by bad sponsors. He detailed five different scams which these sponsors use to take the money and run.

However, there seem to be significant problems with the way this business is set up. New salespeople are required to pay outrageous sign-up fees, and then are required to pass the full amount of their first two sales to their sponsor. So they have to make three sales to even have any hope of making their investment back.

It seems like the Coastal Vacations "home business opportunity" is awfully prone to scams. Where are these sponsors' supervisors? Why aren't they being watched and controlled? Why are the new people supposed to be held responsible for figuring out whether or not they're being victimized?